Although she has been around for eons, Heidi Talbot is pretty new to my musical radar. Having moved to New York at the age of 18, Heidi paid her dues the hard way before being recruited as lead singer for Irish-American band Cherish The Ladies. After five years on the road she spread her wings with the release of her debut solo album In Love & Light . Having played over 150 gigs in 2009 including supporting Eddi Reeder, Heidi has come back with a collection of traditional folk songs that sit pretty well with me. I [...]
Ah, folk. The audience are real ale drinking, unexplainable foot stamping, strange yodelling noise making and sensibly dressed. The musicians are slightly incestuous, or are married to or been in a band with each other, and not exactly rock and roll. Perhaps I'm stereotyping a little – but aside from a lack of yodelling, despite John McCusker's best efforts – the rest is certainly all present and correct this evening, at the third in the Folk Union series at King's Place. The series runs ever Friday night for the next six weeks, and is [...]
Sunday, we started off Irish Singer-Songwriter's Week with a feature on Irishmen under 40 and a promise of more to come. Today, on the cusp of St. Patrick's Day itself, we fulfill that promise in spades, with music of and from a full compliment of young Irish lasses, and - at post's end - links to a full set of revived past features on U2, Sinead O'Connor, and Celtic Punk. Enjoy...and may the luck of the Irish be with ye! [...]
I've been thinking bluegrass all week, thanks to a pair of tickets to this weekend's Joe Val Festival - an annual mid-winter marathon excursion which we've written about profusely in past years. It's a form that often doesn't get included in the folk blogger pantheon, save for the tradfolk and oldtimey set, and a tiny handful of Bluegrass specialists, but here at Cover Lay Down we like to define our terms broadly. In an older sense, of course, our inclusion of the 'grass is easy to defend: bluegrass is most definitely [...]
I somehow managed to reach full-bore adulthood without hearing a lick of Tom Waits . Which is probably all for the better: as I've noted many times , my long-standing preference for melodic voices is only now giving way to a mature appreciation of the unique beauty that springs from powerful truths filtered through broken instruments. And anyway, the Tom Waits songbook is eminently adult, both in the way it looks at the world through bleary, jaded, ancient eyes and the way it rattles about with themes of alcoholics, lonesome trainwatchers, [...]
This is my 50th post since I started writing Carnival Saloon last September . My previous attempt at blogging yielded just three posts before I ran out of steam so I feel justified in raising a virtual bat in recognition of my half century. To any of you now offering polite applause, thank you. Thanks also to anyone who's left a comment or said something nice to me about anything I've written here. It seems appropriate to mark the occasion with the Tom Waits song that I took the blog's name [...]
I've fallen far behind on my new music listening; the stack of great music out there grows faster than I can get to them, sadly. While I winnow down the pile, I've spent most of the week listening to some wonderful, relatively new folk releases from Compass Records , and let me tell you, I'm impressed. The folks at indie roots label Compass, who became sales-parent to Celtic folk-oriented label Green Linnet just two years ago, are caretakers for a surprisingly large stable of true and traditional-leaning folk artists, but [...]
On February 12, 2008, Heidi Talbot is releasing her second solo album since leaving the Irish-American band "Cherish the Ladies." The new album, In Light and Love , is more cohesive than her debut from 2004 and definitely much bolder. The range in this record is impeccable, from dreamy and soft to ultra catchy and uptempo... Listen: Heidi Talbot - " If You Stay " (mp3) For a complete review head on over to Posh Mama ! [...]
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Carnival Saloon
Bring Me Up
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